Beauty

by Sheri S. Tepper

  I stepped away, staring at the fire and at the door behind it. I was the only one who did know what was behind that door, though I had told Mama and she had tried to describe it to anyone who would listen.

  “Father Raymond used to say, ‘Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem,’” I told her. “It means that victory can come out of hopelessness.” She smiled, only a little.

  Israfel came riding back through the quiet host, looking for me. When he saw me, he turned his horse and came straight toward me, bowing to Mama, to Carabosse, even to Puck as he came. When he reached me, he held out a hand and pulled me up onto his horse, then rode a short distance away. We both got down and stood together, looking at the assembled multitude. He was very quiet.

  “I want you to have this,” he said, taking a scarf from around his neck and putting it about mine. It was crimson silk, with bands of silver and gold at the edges. “It is real, not enchanted. I wove it, with my own hands. When we go in, put on your boots and your cloak and go home, back to Westfaire.”

  “To Westfaire? But Carabosse said he would look there.”

  Israfel kissed me gently. “He would have. Oh, yes, my love, he would have looked there. But now, we believe he won’t have time.”

  “I can’t let you go in there alone,” I said. In that instant he was Giles, he was Bill, he was anyone who had ever cared for me. I could not let him go.

  “We aren’t alone,” he said. “Nor are you. And you have something to do yet, Beauty. Something more important than going into that hellhole again. Carabosse knows. I know.”

  A sound caught his attention, and he turned to watch. The moon was rising. The door was opening. He leapt into the saddle and drew me up beside him. He kissed me again. It felt like Giles’s kiss, that night when we danced on the terrace. He laid his head against my breast, where the thing burned, whatever it was. At Mama’s side he left me, then rode forward into the host.

  “Someone will come to tell you about it, daughter,” she said. “Puck, if no one else. Do not grieve over us. We’ve played the proud fools for a very long time.” She leaned down and kissed me, too, on the cheek. My lips and my face and my chest all burned from fairy kisses. Then she rode off, down the hill, and I was left standing beside Puck, holding the reins of my horse in one hand. Carabosse jogged past, waving to me. Below, the horses were pouring through the doors like water down a drain. In no time at all they were gone. The door closed. The cold moon looked down at me, unsmiling.

  I tied Israfel’s scarf around my neck. If there was something left for me to do, I could not imagine what. I had very little time left in which to do anything.

  Puck was kneeling at my feet, holding the boots. I slipped my feet in, one, then the other.

  “I’ll see you there,” he said.

  Perhaps I nodded. Perhaps not. Far off on the top of a hill was a shimmer, a shifting, as of a time machine going back to its own time. I, too, needed to go to my own time.

  “Boots,” I said, “take me home.”

  29

  I tottered on my feet beside the rose-hedge of Westfaire. Beside me was the shepherds’ well. I could barely see the cat’s-head stone. I put out my hands to catch myself, and they were only bones with a little flesh bagged about them, blue veins running like rootlets across their backs and between fingers with nails all ridged and twisted. I sat down on the coping of the well and leaned against the post. Israfel had told me to go to Westfaire. What could I do in Westfaire? Besides, I had no strength to go anywhere.

  I sat there for a long time, accumulating strength, or perhaps losing it. The boots were heavy upon my feet, and I slipped them off. The cloak was heavy upon my limbs, and I took it off as well, letting it lie behind me over the well coping. I sat there in a ragged kirtle, feeling the sun strike my skin through the rents. Ah, well. If I got a bit stronger, I could put the boots back on and go to the Dower House. There might be someone there who remembered me. Or who would take me in, out of charity.

  As I sat up, almost determined to go, something dropped from the pocket of my cloak. I picked it up and looked at it, the hank of thread. I reached into the cloak pocket for the packet of needles and found it with one unlucky fingertip.

  Thread and needles. To sew, so Mama had said, a cap of wisdom, a thinking cap. If one wanted a thinking cap. Mama hadn’t. Wisdom was the curse of man, she said. In seeking wisdom, we had lost our heritage. I didn’t believe that. We hadn’t sought wisdom diligently enough, that’s how we’d lost our heritage. We preferred cleverness to wisdom. Instead of seeking the truth, we had preferred to believe in easy certainties. Always so much easier to take the lazy, easy way and then pretend God had commanded it. I sighed. I couldn’t make a cap. There was nothing to make it of.

  One hand went to my face to wipe frustrated tears away, encountering a corner of the scarf Israfel had given me. Such luxurious silk. Silk for a princess. Real world silk.

  I could make a cap of that.

  That is, I could make a cap if I could thread the needle. My eyes were weak, half-blind. The needle was small. I fumbled with the hank of thread, moving the almost invisible end of thread back and forth. The needle slipped in my hand; I grabbed at it, pricking myself; and the thread fell into the well.

  I sobbed. Weakly. Without conviction. What had made me think I could do it in the first place? My back pressed against the post, I waited to die, believing I could cry myself to death if I just kept at it. There wasn’t much to me anymore. I probably weighed no more than eighty pounds. I thought I would leak my life out through my eyes and then dry up and blow away. That would be the end to it, and I could quit trying.

  “What’s the matter, Grandmother,” said a voice. It was a male voice, a young voice. I couldn’t see who spoke.

  “I’ve dropped my thread,” I said hopelessly. “It dropped into the well.”

  “I’ll get it for you, Grandmother,” the voice said. I hadn’t time to wonder how before I heard the plop of something sizeable dropping into the water. Not a big enough splash to be a person. Or had it been? A quite small person, perhaps?

  I heard assorted liquid sounds, plashings and gulpings, then a scratching and grunting, and finally something wet and cool pressed the soaking hank of thread into my hand.

  “I thank you,” I said. “But I’m afraid my reach is beyond my grasp. I needed it to sew with and cannot see to thread the needle.”

  “It’s a pity we do not have a fairy about,” fretted the voice. “One who would give you keen eyesight as a fairy gift.”

  I started to agree with the young man, coming to myself with rather a start. I was a fairy, one who had been taught such spells, a long time ago. I had learned diminishing spells. The Spell of Bran. Spells for farsight, sure-foot, keen-ear. Perhaps if I blended the former and the latter. Keen-sight was what was wanted.

  I tottered to my feet, made a few graceless passes, and chanted the proper words. My vision cleared at once, and I stared at the well coping where a large green frog sat regarding me with bulging eyes. “How marvelous, Grandmother,” he said. “We had a fairy after all.”

  “I am not your grandmother,” I snapped. At my age it was not easy to snap. The few teeth I still had seemed loose.

  “I know you are probably not really my grandmother,” said the frog. “I was only being polite.”

  Indeed, he was a particularly polite frog. I could not recall, through the fog of my aged memory, that I had ever encountered a frog of such poise before. I cast about for recollections of other frogs, finding such memories sparse and unprofitable, mixed inexplicably with memories of dinners in Bayonne and Lourdes and garlicky servings of something I had preferred to think of at the time as chicken.

  “Of course,” said the frog. “I am not really a frog, either.”

  I had already guessed that. “You’re a prince disguised as a frog,” I hazarded. “To prevent your being killed by your enemies.”

  He shook his head. Since a frog has little neck, this involved shaking the
entire body. The coping was slippery, and he fell into the well once more, emerging moments later very wet and out of breath.

  “Actually,” he said, “I am a prince enchanted into a frog for some reason which I am utterly incapable of understanding.”

  I was busy threading the needle and spared only a moment to look inquiringly at him.

  “Since you are going to be occupied with your sewing, perhaps you would like me to entertain you with my life’s history,” the frog suggested.

  I nodded. Certainly there was no reason why not. Until I got the thinking cap done, there was nothing else I could do but sit and sew. I was already planning how to make the cap, by folding the scarf into fourths, diagonally, as one does to make a cocked hat out of paper, and then sewing the folded side closed and turning it up to make a brim. Since the frog seemingly had not interpreted my nod as permission to go ahead, I repeated it more firmly as I tied a knot in the thread.

  “Ahem,” he began, clearing his throat.

  “My earliest memories are of a childhood surrounded by loving people. My foster father and mother, my nursemaid, the servants, the young man who was hired to play with me, later my tutor. When I was old enough to be told anything at all, I was told that my true father and mother, a prince and princess, lived far away, in another kingdom from which it was thought advisable I be excluded, inasmuch as I was not an heir to the throne and my presence might serve as an excuse for usurpers to cause dissention and unrest. I was told that this step had been taken in order to assure me a happy and extended life, since claimants to thrones, even legitimate ones, often live shorter lives than other, less exalted persons.”

  “I have known of such cases,” I told the frog. “History is rife with them.”

  “So I was informed,” the frog went on. “Since I am not ambitious, this explanation was satisfactory to me. The allowance my foster parents received for my care was sufficient to guarantee a pleasant life, and the maintenance of the estate on which I was reared was a sufficient career to interest me. I learned agriculture, beekeeping, cattle raising, dairying, egg production, fodder storage, gardening, horsemanship, independence, jar molding, kennel keeping, lamb raising, manpower management, nut growing, orchard keeping, poultry breeding, quarrel quashing (among the serfs), rabbit hunting, sheep grazing, timber cutting, usury, viniculture, wool clipping, xyloglyphy, yoke making, and zealotry.”

  “What is xyloglyphy?” I asked, amazed.

  “Wood carving,” he replied. “It was the only x I could think of.”

  “And zealotry?”

  “One must be zealous, mustn’t one. About something.”

  “And you learned usury?”

  “To avoid it, Grandmother.”

  I started to remind him I was not his grandmother, but halted. Dim thought swam through my turgid mind. A fish I could barely see. Something he had said. “Go on with your story,” I said.

  “My foster father, a good man, and my foster mother, a good woman, though at times impatient, gave every attention to my education. I had the finest tutors from the time I was a child and learned Latin, Greek, French, and the common tongue as well as the trivium and quadrivium, including grammar, rhetoric, logic, mathematics, composition, and history. I learned to play four musical instruments and sing in a pleasing voice a great number of popular ballads and instructive songs.”

  “How many times have you told this story?” I asked, taken with the well-rehearsed tone of the verbiage he was spewing.

  “Many times, Grandmother,” he sighed. “More times than I can count. Has it begun to sound overly familiar?”

  “A bit more spontaneity might be welcome,” I said, turning the seam in the cap I was making. “However, whatever comes most naturally to you will do.” I sighed, fretfully, suddenly overcome with hunger.

  “What’s the matter, Grandmother?” the frog asked.

  “I’m starved,” I said. “Literally starved. I have been too long in Faery, and my mortal body has not been fed.”

  “I can find you an apple,” the frog said, leaping off the coping and hopping into the woods which surrounded the rose-hedge. I remembered then that there had been an old orchard there, one that had not been used for generations, except by lovers, lying on the sweet grasses. Within a little time, the frog hopped back again, removed a ripe apple from his mouth, and wiped it upon my ragged skirt, apologizing for the only way he had to carry it. I felt a sudden spasm of affection for the frog.

  The apple was crisp and sweet. I bit into it, gently, in order that my teeth not come out in the sweet flesh of it, and the juice ran down my throat as the frog continued.

  “It’s interesting that you’re not all fairy. I am not all prince, either. Though, as a child, I was told I had royal blood; the kingdom from which I had come was small and had insufficient fortune to keep me well all my life. Therefore, I was educated with a view to becoming industrious and independent. My foster father told me that, when I was twenty-one, he and my foster mother would return to the tiny kingdom from which he had come, and which he missed agonizingly from time to time, though I cannot say why. The stories he told of it were uniformly boring. It had no natural splendors that he could remember, and its architectural heritage he described as rural revival, though a revival of what, he could not say. Still, I looked forward to the day when I should be master of my own destiny, little knowing that such matters are subject to many reversals totally outside one’s own competence.

  “When I was about ten, I learned that my mother and father, whom I had never met, had died in an avalanche. I grieved, though not greatly, since I had never known them.

  “As do all boys, I came to the age of physical maturity somewhat ahead of any mental or emotional stability with which the physical surges and urges might be controlled. I had a bittersweet and blessedly brief affair with a dairy maid, an unsuitable partner, one might say, though she had a lovely complexion, very pretty hair, and a vocabulary not exeeding one hundred words, most of them to do with cows.”

  The frog reminded me of someone. I couldn’t tell who, but he did. His manner of speaking reminded me of someone.

  “I then wooed and won the hand of the fair Elaine,” the frog went on. “A very suitable match. We were to be betrothed on my eighteenth birthday. She was some years younger, and it was thought we would be wed when she was fifteen or sixteen and I about twenty-one. In the interim, my foster father was of the opinion I should seek sophistication through travel. While he did not recommend any attempt to go to the Holy Land, then, as you know, held by the infidels, he did recommend a journey to Santiago de Compostela, to which he had journeyed in his youth with great cheer and good company.”

  Through the murk of memory, the fish swam nearer.

  “However,” said the frog, “before I could depart on the journey set out for me by my foster father, with due regard for continuing my education and experience in ways that would benefit me, I happened to go riding into the forest and became lost. On attempting to find my way out, I came upon a tower in which a maiden sat singing. Her name was Rapunzel, as I learned when an old and opinionated fairy came out of the underbrush, carrying a clock, and insisted that the maiden let down her hair.”

  “Carabosse!” I said. “It could only have been Carabosse.”

  “However did you know, Grandmother? It was indeed the fairy Carabosse. Well, to make a long story short (for I see you have almost completed your sewing), the fairy tricked me in a very unpleasant way, and when I climbed what I thought was a rope of hair securely attached to the head of Rapunzel—a very lovely maiden, indeed—I found the old fairy instead. She harangued me at length upon the subjects of time and beauty, ending her discourse by putting an enchantment upon me that I should become a frog and remain so until kissed willingly by a princess!

  “Since that time, it has been my hope that I would first be kissed, then returned to my natural state, though I fear that neither Rapunzel nor the fair Elaine will have waited. Some thirteen years have passed
since then. Both of them will be old maids of twenty-five, or buxom matrons, mothers of many.” The frog wept briefly. “Though I have spoken to my foster father about the matter, and he assures me the estate will be still be mine when I achieve manhood once again.”

  I finished the cap and put it upon my head. The elusive fish swam up and looked me in the eyes.

  “You are my great-grandson Giles Edward Vincent Charming,” I said.

  “Well of course, Grandmother,” said the frog. “I would not have addressed you so familiarly otherwise.”

  This was specious, but I did not argue with him. I had been one hundred and three when I had visited Carabosse. If, while I dallied returning to Ylles, she had come immediately to the world of men to enchant my great grandson, as she no doubt had, and if thirteen years had passed since that time, I was now one hundred sixteen years old. The century had passed during which Beauty was condemned to sleep. Or was that in the curse? And which curse? Joyeause’s curse, or Carabosse’s? Or Disney’s? I started to blurt all this out, then stopped. Beneath the thinking cap, faculties long unused—nay, faculties never used before—began to stir.

  “At one time,” I said, “I think it was in 1417 or the year after, while in Bayonne, I bought a book by Christine de Pisan. It was called, I recollect, The Treasure of the City of Ladies. Do you know of it, by chance?”

  “I’m sorry, no, Grandmother. I am unacquainted with feminist literature.”

  “She directs her discourse toward princesses, including in that number the daughters of dukes. Would you agree with her inclusive idea of royalty?”

  “The daughters of dukes are certainly very noble, Grandmother. Certainly they might be included among princesses.”

  “Then let me kiss you, child. I have not seen you since you were two years old.”

  I leaned forward and kissed the frog. The air shimmered. I felt dizzy. A small earthquake made the stones beneath us shift, ever so slightly. When I looked up, he stood there before me, stark naked, as fine-looking a young man as has ever been my fortune to see, except for his very slightly bulging eyes. No doubt he would outgrow them in time. I enchanted a few leaves into a long shirt for him and told him that would have to do until we got into Westfaire.